Is this coin a scam?
We've been answering that question for crypto investors since 2017 - back when the ICO boom was minting fresh rugpulls every week. Today we score every listed cryptocurrency using on-chain data, security audits, and independent research.
How we score every coin
Each coin gets a 0–100 safety score derived from five independent buckets. The buckets we apply depend on what the coin actually is - a memecoin gets scored differently than Bitcoin, and a stablecoin differently again.
Contract Mechanics
Honeypot detection, mint authority, ownership renouncement, hidden buy/sell taxes, blacklist functions, proxy upgradability - anything in the contract that could let the team rug-pull you.
Liquidity & Market Health
Trading volume, market depth, exchange listings, wash-trade detection. Can you actually buy and sell this coin without moving the price 50%?
Holder Distribution
Who controls the supply? We check what percentage sits in the top ten wallets and whether any single wallet holds enough to crash the market on its own.
Team & Project Credibility
Doxxed founders, third-party audits, GitHub activity, whitepaper quality, deployer wallet history. The "who's actually behind this?" question.
Social & Behavioral Signals
Community engagement quality (real users vs. bot-pumped vanity metrics), sentiment, news coverage, and any scam allegations or regulatory actions surfaced by our research process.
Rating ladder
The 0–100 score maps to a familiar AAA-to-F letter grade so you can scan a list at a glance.
One model doesn't fit all coins
Bitcoin doesn't have a smart contract or a deployer. A memecoin doesn't have a hashrate or core developers. So we route each coin into one of four scoring rubrics before we score it.
Where the data comes from
Every number on a coin profile traces back to a public, verifiable source. We do not use private, self-reported, or paid data from projects.
Block explorers
On-chain data: contract source, ownership, holder distribution, deploy date, transaction patterns. Anyone can verify what we report by checking the same address.
GitHub repositories
Public commit history, contributor count and update frequency, read directly from the project's own repo.
Exchange APIs
Live volume, market depth and listings from the exchanges themselves. We track venue trust scores so wash-traded volume on shady DEXes doesn't inflate a coin's apparent liquidity.
Audit reports
Audits from recognised firms (CertiK, Trail of Bits, OpenZeppelin, Quantstamp, etc.). We link to the original report and only credit audits whose URLs actually load.
Scams we've watched unfold
A small sample of the disasters we've covered since 2017. Every one of them looked like a winner to someone.
Every one of these would have lit up several of our scoring buckets red on day one. That's the whole point.
What we're not
✗ Financial advice
A high score doesn't mean a coin will go up. A low score doesn't mean it will crash. We score the underlying project, not the trading opportunity. Always do your own research and never invest more than you can afford to lose.
✗ Sponsored
No project pays us to score them. No tier list. No "premium ratings" tier for projects. No paid removals of negative findings. Every coin gets the same algorithm whether it has a $200B market cap or $200. If this policy is ever violated, we commit to disclosing it publicly on this page.
✗ A trading platform
We don't sell, swap, or hold any cryptocurrency. We don't have an affiliate link to an exchange. We're a research site, not a broker.
✗ Infallible
Scams evolve. Sometimes a coin scores well right up until the moment it rugs. The score is a starting point for your own research, not the final word.
Limits of the score
Being honest about what the score doesn't capture is more useful than pretending it captures everything.
A high score does not mean
- ✗The price will go up.
- ✗The project cannot fail.
- ✗It is "safe" to invest.
- ✗The team won't act badly tomorrow.
Crypto is a high-risk asset class. A high score lowers structural risk. It does not eliminate it.
Things our system cannot detect
- ⚠Future scams or rug pulls that haven't happened yet.
- ⚠Insider manipulation that doesn't leave on-chain traces.
- ⚠Off-chain fraud — paid influencers, fake partnerships, marketing puffery.
- ⚠Regulatory changes about to land on a project.
A score is a snapshot of measurable risk signals at a moment in time. It is not a guarantee of anything that comes next.
This tool is designed to support your research, not replace it. If you're relying on a single score to decide whether to put money into something, you're using it wrong.
Start checking coins
Search any cryptocurrency to see its current score, the data behind it, and a plain-English explanation of why.